]]>https://vangardist.com/news-article/need-know-homophobia-worldwide/feed/0Support the Fight against Homophobia: Get the Print Issuehttps://vangardist.com/news-article/support-fight-homophobia-get-print-issue/
https://vangardist.com/news-article/support-fight-homophobia-get-print-issue/#respondWed, 16 May 2018 19:48:53 +0000https://vangardist.com/?p=16732

Did you know that during the Nazi era 15,000 people were sent to concentration camps for same-sex love? Did you know that these people were labelled with a pink triangle and were even considered by other camp inmates as being inferior? Did you know that they often didn’t even survive three days in the camps? And did you know that some of those who survived remained imprisoned after the concentration camps were liberated because homosexuality – in both the Federal Republic of Germany and in Austria – was a prosecutable offense until the 1990s?

If this is all new information to you and you now want to take comfort in the fact that these stories remain a thing of the past, then I will, unfortunately, have to keep alarming you. Although civil partnerships and marriage for same-sex partners have become a reality in more and more countries, this is in many ways overshadowed by the truth that right now, in 2018, homosexuality is banned by law in over 70 countries, and in eight of these, is even punishable by death.

But even laws that grant legal protections cannot protect against hostility. In Vienna, generally considered to be a very tolerant city, 79 percent of homosexual respondents to a survey reported having experienced public hostility for their sexual orientation at least once – 20 percent of whom were even subjected to physical violence.

Homophobia is on the rise again worldwide. This is also true in supposedly liberal society. But we don’t hear much about it. At most, homophobic incidents might make the local media, but only in its usual chronicling of violent crimes. Such things only become international news when they are particularly horrific. In Brazil, on average, a person is killed for their homosexuality every 16 hours. In Ecuador, there are over 200 “re-education clinics” where lesbian women are imprisoned, brainwashed, force-fed and sedated by staff who submit them to “corrective” rape. In Chechnya within the last year, over 100 people suffered days of brutal torture in detainment before being outed and released by the authorities, only for them to then be in danger of honour killings by their own families.

As you can see, many things happen that we’re simply never aware of. This is exactly the reason that led us to the Pink Triangle Campaign. We want to put the issue of homophobia back into the media again and by doing so point out the scope of the problem. In the Nazi era, public solidarity was life-threatening. In liberal countries today, we are free to stand behind any people who need our help. That’s why our action isn’t limited to the queer community but is deliberately aimed to inspire an alliance that includes the wider society.

Share the campaign, show solidarity and talk to the people around you. Homophobia isn’t insurmountable and we’ve already made progress against it. But there are so many people out there who need our help, and their lives often depend on just a few factors – factors we can positively influence.

It was just short of 25 years ago that a new Germany, keen to be progressive, struck Paragraph 175 out of its Criminal Code and thus – for the first time in Germany’s history – completely decriminalized homosexuality. Two and a half decades later, same-sex marriage is the legal reality in most Western countries. And since 2015, even those puritanical schmucks on the other side of the pond have joined in on the zeitgeist and not even the chauvinist Trump administration is seriously considering opposing it. Have decades of struggle for equal rights and acceptance been successful, with the world slowly but surely coming to sanity? Or are we on the brink of a new turning point back to the barbarism of the 20th century?

FAREWELL TO THE BOGEYMAN?

In June 2017, a survey on the topic of “marriage for all” was conducted in Austria – not quite a place you’d call a liberal stronghold – and brought to light something amazing: 59 percent of all citizens of that alpine Catholic republic are in favour of equal rights for homosexual couples. Only 25 percent are decidedly against it! Okay, one might also think that this 25 percent were exactly those ranters and ravers who, that next autumn, cast their ballots for the political party that had members openly flirting with Nazism, parties who now, since Christmas of 2017 hold the country’s Vice Chancellorship and a number of important ministries. All across Europe, the far right is on the rise and our beautiful new world will soon be a matter of history. With a shudder, we watch what’s happening in Russia, the great benefactor of all these far-right parties, from Germany’s AfD to FN in France and FPÖ in Austria. It’s impossible to know where this will end. Taking a closer look at that 2017 survey, however, we see the real surprise: among known voters for the FPÖ (the Austrian counterpart to the AfD), 46 percent of them are for same-sex marriage. Another 17 percent have no opinion about it, and “only” 37 percent of far-right voters are pointedly against it – and those numbers are falling! How can that be? Are we, a progressive polyglot minority, actually losing an enemy?

SEXUAL MORALITY AND MALE DOMINATION

In some ways, the numbers speak for themselves. Yes, it may be that the general tendency towards homophobia is declining – at least in Western industrialized nations. But that still leaves the question of why. Have five decades of Pride activism finally had an effect? Absolutely! History teaches us, however, that momentum can swing to the other direction quite quickly. Just like all values and conventions, the rejection or persecution of homosexuality is always a child of the social order that surrounds it. Homophobia isn’t simply a reflex that can be overcome through enlightenment; it’s concomitant with a particular type of social organization: that of the patriarchy. Because the rule of men over families and communities is by no means a law of nature, this domination requires a varied set of sophisticated rules about what’s sexually permissible and what isn’t. For most of the history of civilization, it was essentially impossible to produce definite proof of biological paternity. And for a society structured around the patrilineal inheritance of power, property, and status, that issue of paternity is a critical one. Whereas motherhood has always been hard to deny, the sperm donor behind a pregnancy could have been any guy who was left alone with the woman of the of the house for five minutes. The only solution to this problem: draconian sanctions for any and all promiscuous behaviour. And the ultimate promiscuity – at least from a patriarchal perspective – is the homoerotic. Because it subverts exactly this possessive sexual morality, one which has been cultivated over centuries to secure male dominance.

RELIGION AND RACIAL DELUSION

That hatred and persecution of homosexuals – as currently seen in Putin’s Russia – is routinely dressed up as a religious issue shouldn’t mislead you. The sociological study of religion, which has often faced persecution itself, argued more a century ago that we actually mean “society” when we say “God”. The entire construct of moral laws and judgements has been fashioned into religion only to lend it a transcendental legitimacy – to make it seem out of our control and thus harder to tear down. Yet this certainly doesn’t mean that the God of the Bible has a monopoly on the persecution of sexual minorities. That blatant homophobia follows a treacherous social logic is best seen in the fascist mass phenomena of the 20th century. In National Socialism, which replaced God with a perfidious and perverse racial ideology, the systematic persecution of homosexuals was frequently justified by the argument that homosexual behaviour didn’t contribute to the continuation of the family and thus the German race and was therefore damaging to the prevailing social order. The maniacal and demented Nazis were also maniacal and demented about homophobia: a small modification to the already-mentioned Paragraph 175 in the German Criminal Code was enough to send tens of thousands of people to a certain death merely for their sexual orientation.

CHANGE ISN’T IN THE AIR

Anybody who believes that the period after 1945 brought about major changes is only partly correct. The Federal Republic of Germany quietly kept Paragraph 175 on the books and continued to persecute and prosecute homosexuals with the help of exactly those “pink lists” used by the Gestapo in its attempts to exterminate them. In order to differentiate itself from National Socialism, the new German republic, alongside the church, which had been marginalized by the Nazis, aimed to revisit the petit bourgeois morals of the Wilhelmine period. In this father-mother-children Wirtschaftswunder ideal, homosexuality, for the reasons described above, had no place. Different system, same nonsense. The sexual revolution and the social upheavals of the late 60s brought about a relaxation of sexual mores, though even in the wild 70s – after the pill and before HIV – it was frequently still problematic to be openly gay or lesbian.

HIV BACKLASH

The emergence of a mysterious “gay disease” at the beginning of the 1980s flooded Western industrial nations with hysterical homophobia once again. Until it was discovered, after some time, that becoming infected with HIV can happen to anyone who…well…you already know. A lot has happened since then, not least because broad public discussion about these sexual topics had to be held in order to advance HIV prevention. These actions were led by a number of prominent figures who were openly homosexual and they had a definite mainstreaming effect. However, the 1980s also marked a turning point on a completely different level, the impact of which we can still very much feel today: it was the decade of the neoliberal turn towards the unbounded globalization we all live in today.

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND EVERYONE AGAINST EVERYONE

So what does this have to do with the history of homophobia? Maybe more than we’d like to think. A fundamental condition of neoliberal ideology is the concept of radical individualism: we are all the architects of our own destinies and we’re all responsible for ourselves. Politically, economically, and culturally, society is no longer envisioned as having a common fate or as being built upon solidarity. Instead, it’s where the powerful are given carte blanche. It’s a free-for-all, with everyone out for themselves. Welcome to the world of the McFit gym franchise, casting shows, zero-hours work contracts, for-profit education, and dating apps. The triumph of individualism has led to a massive erosion of traditional social structures and networks, especially the notion of the family as the basis of community life. And because there can be no patriarchy without families, different sexual orientations have lost some of their potential threat over the last couple of decades – in the West, that is.

BACK TO THE 30S?

So does all this focus on individualism mean everything will be all right? Are we facing a hypertolerant future where everybody’s accepted and respected for who they are? Perhaps. But it’s just as likely that we’re on the cusp of a new turn of events. The beautiful new world of identity politics, in which everyone can proudly just put themselves out there, even highly individual, discriminated-against minority selves, has a nasty downside. When everybody considers themselves to be something really special, their readiness to reach out to others in solidarity fades, and thus the ability to collectively exert political pressure on employers or governments does as well. And this is where it all starts to topple. It’s the people who feel they’ve been taken for a ride by this hyperindividualism who are now voting for the AfD, FN and FPÖ. Because the need for an organized community that once again acts in the interest of the masses is growing. The one thing that far-right voters, from Austria to the US of A, have in common is their desire for smaller-scale, orderly, and authoritarian relationships. At the moment, their attitude towards homosexuality leans towards indifference. But just a spark of this idea of the good old days of racist, chauvinist, nationality-based societies, and we’re back in the 1930s sooner than we can scream “homophobia”.

]]>https://vangardist.com/news-article/brief-history-homophobia/feed/0The History of the Pink Trianglehttps://vangardist.com/news-article/history-pink-triangle/
https://vangardist.com/news-article/history-pink-triangle/#respondWed, 16 May 2018 10:56:23 +0000https://vangardist.com/?p=16687

Up to 15,000 homosexual men were deported to concentration camps during the reign of National Socialist terror, and of these, more than 60 percent would not survive the abuse, forced labour, hunger and illness they met with. Like other concentration camp prisoners, their whole bodies were shaved and they were assigned a number to be sewn onto their striped inmate’s uniforms as their sole identifying feature. From then on, every attempt was made to take all individuality away. However, within the camps, color-coded badges in an inverted triangle shape classified why each prisoner was incarcerated.

Although this classification system wasn’t uniformly used in all concentration camps, these triangles are symbols still seen on many memorials to the victims of Nazi persecution. Red triangles were borne by political prisoners, green by so-called career criminals, black by “asocials”, purple by Jehovah’s Witnesses, brown by Roma and Sinti, and blue by emigrants, generally meaning people who had attempted to flee but then been captured. In the pink triangles that marked homosexuals, the number 175 was sometimes added – a reference to Paragraph 175 of the German Reich legal code, which ordered “unnatural sexual offences between men” to be punished with imprisonment. Jews bore the yellow star, formed from overlapping triangles. In the earlier years of the concentration camps, and in some cases later, prisoner numbers were also added to the triangles, alongside other distinctions that specified nationality or assigned types of labour.

Forced labour in camps often meant that pink triangle prisoners died within a matter of days. Their odds of survival were particularly grim in the brickworks of Sachsenhausen near Berlin, in the stone pits of Flossenbürg and Mauthausen, and in the Emsland and Neugamme camps. Homosexual prisoners were also sent to armaments factories, for instance in Mittelbau-Dora, and in Buchenwald and Natzweiler, medical experiments on homosexual prisoners were carried out to search for a “cure” for homosexuality. Lesbian women were not assigned a distinct category in the concentration camps, and same-sex activity between women would only sometimes be penalized with arrest (though it was more sharply criminalized in Austria). From the National Socialist point of view, lesbians posed far less of a threat to the German body politic than homosexual men did.

The 175s, or pink-triangle prisoners, were never victims of the extermination policies of the Nazi regime, which were founded in racist ideology and targeted Jews, Roma and Sinti. However, of the concentration camp prisoners who were ethnic Germans and thus “citizens of the Reich”, homosexuals were at the bottom of the prison hierarchy and had some of the highest death rates. Homosexuals had to fear especially savage violence from the SS, and within the camps they were often isolated, with no allies, as they often met with the contempt of other prisoners. The pervasive hatred of homosexual men, a prejudice which carried across all levels of society, was therefore also widespread among concentration camp prisoners. Those homosexual men who survived the concentration camps largely remained silent about the reasons for their persecution or would invent others. Societal hatred of homosexuals was simply too strong, also in the post-war period.

This meant that even after their liberation, the former pink-triangle prisoners had no lobby or political representation. Also, clauses in the criminal code that had persecuted homosexual acts remained in force in both German and Austria, with ex-prisoners being classified as convicted sex offenders. Established victims groups resisted recognizing homosexual survivors of concentration camps as victims of National Socialism and therefore stood against any form of compensation for these victims. First in 2005 did the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, which was founded in 1995, agree to make “gesture payments” to previously unrecognized victims of the Nazi regime, including those persecuted for their homosexuality. Only then, in 2005, after most of these victims had died, came actual recognition in Austria’s Victims’ Welfare Act, along with all associated rights, such as crediting time spent in concentration camp prisons in retirement calculations. And finally in 2009, Nazi-era convictions for homosexuality were cleared from gay victims’ records.

During in the 1970s, the pink triangle began to be reappropriated by the freshly established gay rights movement: as a symbol of gay pride on the one hand, and as a sign of fellowship with the victims of Nazi persecution on the other. A new reinterpretation of the pink triangle then came with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s when, with the triangle’s point facing upward, it became the slogan for “silence = death” and thus an icon of resistance against the social exclusion of people facing another deadly challenge, this time in the form of HIV and AIDS.

I cannot give a comprehensive account here of the legal and social circumstances that led to the persecution of homosexuals during the Nazi era. Instead, I would like to discuss the conditions of their internment.

There is no doubt that Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which severely punished any homosexual activity, exclusively pertained to men. This doesn’t mean that lesbian women in the “Third Reich” were exempt from prosecution and persecution; however, other legal treatment was applied to them instead of Paragraph 175. In Nazi logic, lesbians were not entirely excluded from reproductive roles, and they continued to be seen as women who had the potential of becoming mothers. They were therefore prosecuted based on the penal code’s “asocial decree”, which frequently them with prison or sent them to concentration camps labelled as tramps, as “work-shy”, or as prostitutes.

Gay men, on the other hand, were considered perpetually excluded from the reproductive process as they were “permanently affected by this virus”, even after a single same-sex act (according to the pseudoscientific verdict of Nazi doctors). For this reason, they were targeted by Paragraph 175, which was codified in 1872 and, after 1935, expanded and more severely punished.

Consequently, homosexual activities were no longer punishable by six months in prison but suddenly threatened with up to a five-year sentence in a penitentiary. For repeat “offenders”, this sentence could be extended to up to ten years. Many convicted men were interned in concentration camps, where they would be branded with the “pink triangle” for all to see.

How were the various detention sites different from each other? Did it even matter whether you were in a prison versus a penitentiary versus a concentration camp? Weren’t they all under totally despotic control, and weren’t gay men killed in all three types of sites?

When considering these tragic fates individually, the parallel isn’t completely false: in all three types of detention site, the “Paragraph 175s” were on the lowest rung of the prisoner hierarchy, with solidarity and support from other prisoners either non-existent or circumstantial at best. In all three, there were fatalities: we now believe that more than half of all gay men interned by the “Third Reich” were killed in custody.

Detention in a jail (a standard prison without forced labour) or in a penitentiary (a more severe prison facility with forced labour) came with a release date, set by the judgment of a court. That meant, despite all of the abuse and harassment in these prisons, there was a fixed date you could expect to be released by, and “good behaviour” might bring early release. Trial procedures and prison sentencing were under the jurisdiction of the judiciary system, and while policies under this Nazi criminal justice system were definitely harsh and inhumane, they absolutely cannot be equated to those of the concentration camps.

Many of the “175s” served their standard prison sentences in regular prisons and would then, just as they had exited the prison gates after serving their time, be seized by the police or the Gestapo and placed into “protective custody”: in truth, this was an immediate transfer to a concentration camp. This “protective custody”, unlike judicial sentences, was indefinite in length, and the concentration camps were not under the authority of the judiciary but of the SS and Gestapo.

It also frequently happens that pink triangle prisoners are very negatively judged in the recollections of other concentration camp survivors, even long after the liberation of the camps. Sometimes this may be related to the fact that a large number of other young men were regularly the victims of sexual violence carried out by their fellow inmates (not by the “175s” but by other prisoners who were exploiting their dominance in the camp hierarchy). An essential differentiation seems not to have taken place here.

Therefore, the words spoken by the Auschwitz survivor Kurt Hacker to dedicate a commemorative plaque to the “pink triangle” prisoners, added to the memorial site in Mauthausen in the 1980s, prove all the more remarkable. The director of the memorial at that time, Hacker stated:

“You have suffered the same wrongs in this camp as we political prisoners did and as the Jews did. You were beaten like dogs in this camp. Therefore, it is high time that you have a place where you can remember the people you have lost.”

The plaque in Mauthausen was the first, and for a long time remained the only, commemoration of the Paragraph 175 concentration camp victims.

It seems self-evident to us today that concentration camp victims who bore the “pink triangle” are valued as equally as all other victims. In an international context, however, we are still a very long way from making this an established truth. During discussions held by the Comité International de Mauthausen about the theme for this coming year’s annual liberation anniversary events, we have once again decided to hit the breaks on giving a commemorative focus to Mauthausen’s gay and lesbian victims. It isn’t that Comité International de Mauthausen delegates find such a recognition unimportant – but they are (justifiably) worried that recognizing and honouring this group of victims could cause them great difficulties with the judicial authorities in their home countries. It isn’t just that Germany’s Paragraph 175 remained in force until 1994, or that that deep homophobic prejudices still exist today: in many European countries, even the act of remembering these victims is met with massive opposition.

Andreas Baumgartner, a historian in Vienna, has spent over 20 years researching the Mauthausen concentration camp. He serves as head of the organizing committee for the annual commemoration events that mark the anniversary of Mauthausen’s liberation and is general secretary of the Comité International de Mauthausen.

When the book The Men with the Pink Triangle appeared in 1972, it was the first time a gay man dared to report his fate as a victim of Nazi-regime persecution. It was published using the pen name Heinz Heger. Though it was actually the pseudonym of the author, Hans Neumann, who had assembled the book from collected interviews, the name Heinz Heger has also become associated with that person whose torments in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg were recounted in the book: Josef Kohout.

Kohout, born in 1915, had a sheltered life growing up in Vienna’s 9th district. He learned the hairdressing trade but then spent the late 1930s working for the postal service. During his two-year military service, however, which ended in 1938, he met the non-commissioned officer Georg Lindenberger. When Lindenberger was later arrested for same-sex activity, he stated that Josef Kohout had been the one to introduce him to “homosexual circles”. Lindenberger faced criminal charges under Paragraph 129 I b of the Austrian penal code, which had existed since 1852 and punished “sexual offences against nature” with a prison sentence of five years in a penitentiary. Even after the Anschluss of Austria to the “Third Reich” in March 1938, the Austrian penal code remained in force, which, in contrast to even the Nazi-revised Paragraph 175 in Germany, also punished female homosexuality.

In mid-April 1939, Josef Kohout was also arrested. During his interrogation at the Gestapo headquarters at Morzinplatz in Vienna, he denied the “sexual offences” with Lindenberger but finally admitted his ongoing relationship with Karl Schwarz, who in his diary was given the name Fred. Kohout later explained that the Gestapo had presented a photo of his friend to him: “I just shook my head. I couldn’t get a word out; it was as if a cord were tied around my neck. A whole world came tumbling down inside me, the world of friendship and love for Fred.” After months of pretrial detention, Kohout was put on trial at the State Court of Vienna and sentenced to seven months in a brutal penitentiary. After serving his full sentence, the Gestapo ordered him returned to its custody. He was imprisoned again, this time without any judicial procedure but solely on the basis of a decision made by a Gestapo official.

“By January 1940 the complement for the transport was made up, and we were to be taken to a camp.” After nearly a two-week prison transport journey, Josef Kohout arrived at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin. He had to sew a pink triangle, the sign that he was an inmate because of his homosexuality, onto his prison uniform. At that time, Sachsenhausen was perhaps one of the worst concentration camps for homosexuals: in a block separated from the other prisoners, their penal battalion was subject to forced labour in the brickworks. “This clay pit, known among us prisoners as the death pit, was both famed and feared […] as a factory of human destruction.” Being “hounded to death by the most terrible working conditions, as well by actual torture”, brutally mishandled by the prisoner-foreman kapos, forced to stand naked in ice-cold, hours-long roll calls: “In this way, the SS’s demonic machinery of extermination ravaged the ranks of us gays, pruning the numbers in our block only to make way for the next batch of homosexuals sent in from the Reich and its newly occupied territories.” So reports Kohout in his memoir.

But Josef Kohout was lucky: In May 1940 he was transferred to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Already at Sachsenhausen, he had entered into a relationship with a kapo (sometimes spelled capo), who in return for sexual services held a safeguarding hand over him and supplied him with additional rations. Later, Kohout would write in his memoir, “No matter who might condemn me for it, […] why shouldn’t I seize this opportunity to save my life, even it was degrading?” Today it is difficult to estimate how widespread homosexuality in concentration camps was. The Austrian concentration camp survivor Herman Langbein describes this as “ersatz homosexuality”, where kapos retained and sexually exploited younger men or boys – Kohout called them “dolly-boys”. “Homosexual behaviour between two ‘normal’ men is considered an emergency outlet”, reports Kohout, “while the same thing between two gay men, who both feel deeply for one another, is something ‘filthy’ and repulsive.” Nevertheless, kapos and their “dolly-boys” could count on harsh punishment if their relationships were revealed. Sexual relationships between homosexual prisoners were very much an exception, with physical abuse and exhaustion making such relationships barely even possible.

In the Flossenbürg concentration camp, too, Josef Kohout found a kapo who treated him reasonably well and afforded him some protection from abuse, and from the fate a homosexual man from Innsbruck met in the bunker: “He was stripped naked and tied with his hands to a hook in the wall so that his body hung in the air and he couldn’t touch the ground with his feet.” Kohout recounts an SS guard scalding the man’s testicles with hot water and then “taking up a broom that stood in the corner and shoving the handle up the prisoner’s anus. He was already incapable of screaming anymore – his voice had simply seized up with pain.” Relief only came when the SS man grabbed a wooden stool and smashed it “with all his force on the victim’s head.” “This finally freed the poor martyr from his pains, for now he was really dead.” Saved from such an end, Kohout even rose up in the ranks to become a kapo himself, the only known “pink triangle” kapo in the history of the concentration camps, even though his self-designation as “Himmler’s queer capo” may be something of an exaggeration. But Josef Kohout did, in any event, manage to survive nearly five years in the camp as a pink triangle prisoner. On 25 April 1945, he and his fellow prisoners, after escaping a forced death march to Dachau, were liberated by the advancing US troops.

After the war, Kohout was employed in a leather and shoe care products company and in the textile industry. In 1946 he applied for restitution payments from the Republic of Austria, or to at least have the duration of his imprisonment be recognized and calculated into his pension credits. Both his claims were rejected because, as a pink triangle prisoner, he was not entitled to such compensation. In the 1980s, Kohout’s petition to be recognized as a victim of National Socialism was given support by the Homosexuelle Initative (HOSI) Vienna and the Austrian Ombudsman Board. In 1992 he probably became the only pink triangle prisoner to have his detention time calculated as a contribution period to his pension, but when he died in 1994, he had still never been granted full, lawful recognition as a victim of the Nazi regime.

In the summer of 2010, a small green area at Zimmermannplatz in Vienna’s 9th district, where Josef Kohout grew up and lived until he died, was dedicated as Heinz Heger Park in memory of him and of his fate as a homosexual victim of National Socialism. Kohout’s pink triangle, the only such badge that can be linked to an identifiable homosexual prisoner of a concentration camp, is displayed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

All English-language quotes from: Heinz Heger. The Men with the Pink Triangle. Translated by David Fernbach. New York: Alyson Books 1994.

]]>https://vangardist.com/news-article/man-pink-triangle/feed/0“Mauthausen is a place for the present!”https://vangardist.com/news-article/mauthausen-place-present/
https://vangardist.com/news-article/mauthausen-place-present/#respondWed, 16 May 2018 10:21:45 +0000https://vangardist.com/?p=16670

DDr Barbara Glück has been the director of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial since 2005. She understood our request right away and gave it her support. While the volunteers were on site at the memorial to take part in our film, I had the chance to speak with her, and our interview developed into a fascinating dialogue.

Director Glück, 2018 is the 80th anniversary of Mauthausen. What does this number represent?

On 8 August 1938, just 80 years ago, the first prisoners were brought to Mauthausen. But Mauthausen didn’t just fall from the sky. There is a history before that moment, one which led to the construction of the camp system. What happened 80 years ago cannot be taken aside from this other history and looked at separately. There was a process that led to it, and such processes can also happen today. That’s what we want to convey.

And since when has Mauthausen been a memorial site?

The memorial has existed since 1949. The camp was liberated by the US Army, and from the summer of 1945, the former camp was under the administration of the Soviets. In 1947, its grounds were handed over to the Republic of Austria by the Soviet High Command. Under one condition: Austria must erect a memorial here. Two years later, the memorial site was opened, and survivors of the camp accepted it the most readily. They would welcome visitors and lead tours. We now face the challenge of how to design the site so that, also without the active involvement of former prisoners, coming generations can also take something from it.

Such as?

Seeing what can happen when a society becomes completely numbed and fails. Of course we know the value of human rights, but do we stand by those rights when we need to? How can it be that in the middle of a so-called civilized society, millions of people were murdered? When groups of visitors, often school groups, ask themselves these questions and begin to draw parallels to the circumstances of today, questions such as “How can it be that people are still being displaced, tortured, and abused?” That’s when we meet our goal. We reach it when visitors go home with more questions than they came with.

How do you see the issue of homophobia in relation to the concentration camp memorial? Has it also been an issue in your work?

Homophobia is a particularly tragic example of how Mauthausen and the history it stands for did not begin in 1938 or end in 1945. The persecution of homosexuals in the Nazi era and in postwar Austria cannot be equated with each other. But even after 1945, homosexuality was a criminal offence in Austria. This was until 1971, and only in 2005 were gay people officially recognized as a victim group. After the liberation of the camp, many homosexuals had to live with a doubled trauma. They knew they were in violation of the law and in fact living “illegally”. And this also forbade them to speak of the imprisonment and torture they went through.

What do you think of the Pink Triangle campaign?

You [Vangardist] deliberately chose to come to a difficult place, one that presents the project with a double tragedy. That is remarkably courageous, especially as homosexuals were only, as just mentioned, given recognition as a victim group in 2005. Still today, people are being hunted down, tortured and murdered. The crimes of National Socialism were possible because too many people chose to avert their eyes to what was happening. One of the key lessons of the past is to not look the other way, and today, individuals and activists like you are explicitly choosing to instead take a closer look. One history cannot be equated with another, thus the situation then cannot be equated with now. But we can select individual aspects to point out where events can be compared and where they threaten to develop in similar ways. The persecution of homosexuals is a good example of this because it began long before 1938 and still, unfortunately, persists today. This isn’t an isolated topic. There are larger themes of exclusion, prejudice, ignorance and, above all, looking the other way when other people, for whatever reason, are being persecuted. We have a Charter of Human Rights, signed by nearly every country in the world, and these rights can never be demanded often enough!

Can a person heal from hate?

I hope so. I believe in the good in people and I also believe that people can change. Otherwise I would have stopped doing this work a long time ago.